City Primeval

3

BECAUSE OF THE LIGHTS Raymond Cruz thought of a movie set. The overhead burglar spot and the headlights illuminating the scene. He thought of an actor in a television commercial saying, “The victim’s suit is light blue, the blood dark red and the gravel a grayish white.” He thought of a movie running backward in a projector, seeing the uniformed officers sucked into the blue and white Plymouths and the squad cars and the EMS van and the morgue wagon yanked out of the picture. Stop there-leaving the silver Continental and the murder victim. He heard Jerry Hunter say, “Well, somebody finally did in the little fucker.”

It was difficult to think of Alvin Guy as victim.

“When I talked to Herzog,” Raymond said, “the first thing I thought was how come it hasn’t happened before this?” He stood at the edge of the scene with Hunter and his executive sergeant, Norbert Bryl. “Who found him?”

“Car from the 11th,” Bryl said. “The judge’d called nine-eleven on his car phone, but the operator couldn’t get the location. Then a few minutes later a woman on the next street over there, 20413 Coventry, she calls at one-thirty-five to report gunshots.”

“How about witnesses?”

“Nothing yet. Wendell’s talking to the woman. Maureen’s around someplace. American La France doesn’t have a night number, but I don’t think Judge Guy was here buying fire equipment.”

“The squad-car guys make him?”

“Yeah. They couldn’t tell by looking at him, but his wallet was lying there.”

Raymond said, quietly but earnestly, “If they knew it’s Guy then why didn’t they pick him up and dump him in Hazel Park? It’s two blocks away.”

“Lieutenants aren’t supposed to talk like that,” Bryl said. “It’s a nice idea though. Their body, their case. The squad-car guys didn’t know for sure he’s dead, so they call EMS. EMS comes, they take one look, call the meat wagon.”

Hunter said, “They don’t know he’s dead? He took about three in the mouth, two more in the chest, through and through, big fucking exit wounds-they don’t know he’s dead.”

Uniformed evidence technicians were taking Polaroid shots of the body and the Mark VI, measuring distances, drawing a plan of the scene, picking up betting ticket stubs, credit cards, cigarette butts; they would haul the judge’s car to the police garage on Jefferson and go over it for prints, poke around in all its crevices. One of the morgue attendants, in khaki shirt and pants, stood watching with a plastic body bag over his shoulder. Bryl began making notes for his Case Assigned Report.

It was 2:50 A.M. Alvin Guy had been dead little more than an hour and Raymond Cruz, the acting lieutenant in the navy-blue suit he had put on because he was meeting the girl from the News, felt time running out. He said, “Well, let’s knock on some doors. We’re not gonna do this one without a witness. We start dipping in the well something like this we’ll have people copping to everything but the killing of Jesus. I don’t want suspects out of the file. I want a direction we can move on. I want to bust in the door while the guy’s still in bed, opens his eyes he can’t fucking believe it. Otherwise-we’re all retired down in Florida working for the Coconuts Police Department, the case still open. I don’t want that to happen.”

Norbert Bryl, the executive sergeant of Squad Seven, Detroit Police Homicide Section, had his graying hair razor-cut and styled at “J” Roberts on East Seven Mile once a month. He liked dark shirts and light-colored ties, beige on maroon, wore wire-frame tinted glasses and carried a flashlight that was nearly two feet long. Bryl plotted a course before he moved.

He said, “You don’t want to rule out robbery as the only motive.”

“Fires through the windshield and hits Guy in the mouth,” Raymond said. “I want to meet this robber before he gets into something heavy.”

The acting lieutenant left a few minutes later to find a telephone and report to Inspector Herzog. They did not talk about murder over radios.

Wendell Robinson, in a three-piece light-gray suit, came out of the darkness holding a small brown-paper sack. He said, “You doing any good?… I talk to the woman on Coventry call the nine-eleven? I say, I believe you heard some gunshots. The woman say yeah, and I saw the man done it. Earlier he was out in the alley and I saw him with this gun. I ask her which man is this and she told me he lives down the street, twenty-two five-eleven. I go down there, get the man out of his bed and ask him about a gun he has. Man frowns and squints like he’s trying to get his memory working. Says no, I don’t recall no gun. I say well, the lady down the street saw you with a gun, out’n the alley. You come on downtown we’ll have a witness lineup, see if she can pick you out. The man say oh, that gun. Yeah, old thing I was looking to shoot rats with. Yeah, I found that gun yesterday, right in the same alley.” Wendell held up the bag. “Little froze-up Saturday night piece, blow the man’s hand off he ever fire it.”

“They lie to you,” Hunter said. “They fucking lie right to your face.”

Another man sitting in a car had been shot to death in front of the Soup Kitchen, corner of Franklin and Orleans, and the shooter-they learned later-had waited around to see the police cars and the EMS van arrive before he hopped on a Jefferson Avenue bus and went home.

There were people here, hanging around the unmarked blue Plymouth sedans, who had thrown on clothes or a bathrobe to come out and watch. Most of them seemed to be black people. Women holding their arms like they were cold. Figures silhouetted by the street light on the corner. It was a clear night, temperature in the mid-60s, warm for October.

Hunter, running a finger beneath his sandy mustache, stared openly at the watchers, studying them. When he turned to Bryl he said, “If it’s robbery, why’d the judge pull in here?”

“To take a leak,” Bryl said. “How do I know why he pulled in. But he was robbed and that’s all we got so far.”

“It was a hit,” Hunter said. “Two guys. They set him up-see him at the track, arrange a meet. Maybe sell him some dope. One of ’em gets in the car with the judge, like he’s gonna make the deal, the other guy-he’s not gonna shoot through the window, his partner’s in the line of fire. So he hits him through the windshield. With a .45.”

“Now you have the weapon,” Bryl said. “Where’d you get the .45?”

“Same place you got the piss he had to take,” Hunter said. “Any way you put the judge here, for whatever reason, it’s still a hit.”

“This other man in the car,” Wendell Robinson said, “he sitting there while the judge’s calling the nine-eleven?”

“You guys’re hung up on details,” Hunter said. “We’re talking about motive. Did the shooter have a motive other’n robbery?”

“Okay, I’m gonna give you the job, make up the list of suspects,” Bryl said, “if you have enough paper and pencils and you have about a month with nothing to do, because you know how many names you’re talking about? Every lawyer ever had a case in front of Judge Guy. Every guy he ever sent away. Everybody in the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office. Every police officer-I’ll be conservative-half the police officers in the city. Put down about twenty-six hundred names right there. Anybody even knew the prick, it’s gone through their mind.”

Wendell Robinson said to Hunter, “Idea upsets him.”

“Yeah, he don’t want to think about it,” Hunter said, “but it was a fucking hit and he knows it.”

Maureen Downey appeared out of the dark now and stood listening, holding a notebook and purse to her breast the way young girls carry school books. When Hunter noticed her she said, “If it was a hit, why’d he drive in here?”

“To go the bathroom,” Hunter said. “Maureen, let’s get out of here and find a motel.”

She said, “Let’s see if we can get a positive I.D. on the other car first.”

Hunter said, “You think you’re gonna impress me with that detective shit, you’re crazy. You’re a girl, Maureen.”

“I know I’m a girl,” Maureen said. She smiled easily and was never shocked, by words or bullet wounds. She had the healthy look of a brown-haired, 110-pound marathon runner and had been a homicide detective five of her fourteen years with the Detroit Police Department. Hunter would remind Maureen she was a girl. Or Hunter would tell her she was just one of the dicks. Hunter liked to play with Maureen and see her perfect teeth when she smiled.

Bryl used his flashlight to poke her arm and said, “What other car, Maureen?”

They waited as Raymond Cruz walked over to them from the Plymouth. He said, “Who wants another one?” Keeping his voice low. “Twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old white female, no I.D. Well dressed, shot, possibly raped, burn marks-what look like burn marks-on the inside of her thighs. Found her in Palmer Park half hour ago.”

“Insect bites,” Hunter said. “They can look like burn marks. Remember the guy-what was his name-the GM exec. Looked like he’d been burned, it turned out to be ant bites.”

“Somebody lying in the weeds a couple of days, maybe,” Raymond said. “This one’s fresh. Car from the 12th spotted a guy out on the golf course, two o’clock in the morning. They put a light on him and he runs. Start chasing him and almost trip over the woman’s body.”

Bryl said, “They get the guy?”

“Not yet, but they think he’s still in the park.”

Hunter said, “Tell ’em they want to I.D. the lady, go across Woodward-what’s the name of that place?-where all the hookers and the fags hang out.”

“I asked Herzog, he said no, she doesn’t look like a hooker. Probably she was dumped there. So-we can have her if we want. Herzog says how’s it look here? I told him I don’t know, we could be around all day and still use some help.”

Maureen said, “We’ve got a second car at the scene. Young guy hanging around-wait’ll you hear the story.”

Raymond took time to give her a warm look that was almost a smile. “I turn my back a few minutes, Maureen, what do you do? Come up with a witness. Is he any good?”

“I think you’re gonna like him,” Maureen said, opening her notebook.

In his statement Gary Sovey, twenty-eight, explained how his car had been stolen the previous week and how a friend of his happened to see it this evening in the parking lot of the Intimate Lounge on John R. Gary said he went over there with a baseball bat to wait for whoever stole it to come out of the lounge and get in the car, a ’78 VW Scirocco. Gary stated that he waited in the vicinity of Local 771 UAW-CIO headquarters, which is between the Intimate Lounge and the American La France Fire Equipment Company. At approximately 1:30 A.M. he saw the Silver Mark VI traveling at a high rate of speed south on John R with a black Buick like nailed to its tail. He heard tires squeal and thought the two cars had turned the corner onto Remington. He was on the north side of Local 771, in other words away from the American La France parking lot, so he didn’t actually see what happened. But he did hear something that sounded like gunshots. Five of them that he could still hear if he concentrated. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. About a minute later he thought he heard what sounded like a woman screaming, but he isn’t positive about that part. Was he sure the black car was a Buick? Yes. In fact, Gary said, it was an ’80 Riviera and he would bet it had red pin-striping on it.

“The part about the woman screaming-” Raymond stopped. “First-did he get the guy who stole his car?”

Maureen said it turned out the car had been there two or three days, abandoned, and the Intimate Lounge owner was about to call the police. So Gary was still mad.

She said, “I like the part about the woman screaming too. We can talk to Gary about it some more.”

Raymond said, “If there was a woman with the judge and the guy’s gonna shoot her anyway, why didn’t he do it here?”

Hunter said, “Took her to the park, fool around a little first.”

Bryl said, “I love to listen to you guys. You take the bare possibility a woman was even here and you make her the one found in the park. Two separate shootings with no apparent nexus at all except they were both shot about the same time. The judge here, the woman four, five miles away in Palmer Park.”

“Across the street from Palmer Woods,” Raymond said, “where the judge lived.”

It stopped Bryl for a moment. He said, “Okay, you want to believe it, that’s fine. If there’s a connection we’ll know by this afternoon, but right now I’m not gonna jump up in the air and get all excited. You know why?”

As he spoke they separated, moving aside to let the morgue wagon roll out to the street and Raymond didn’t hear the rest of what Bryl said. He didn’t have to. Norb Bryl wasn’t going to jump up in the air because he was Norb Bryl-who weighed evidence before giving an opinion and kept hunches to himself. He would say, “We don’t even know absolutely for sure from the medical examiner the cause of death and you’re talking about a nexus.” Bryl had established his image.

Raymond Cruz was still working on his.

Thirty-six years old-what do you want to be when you grow up? He wanted to be a police officer. He was a police officer. But what kind? (This is where it became gray, hazy.) Uniformed? Precinct Commander? Administrative? Deputy Chief some day with a big office, drapes-shit, why not work for General Motors?

He could be dry-serious like Norbert Bryl, he could be dry-cool like Wendell Robinson, he could be crude and a little crazy like Jerry Hunter… or he could appear quietly unaffected, stand with hands in the pockets of his dark suit, expression solemn beneath the gunfighter mustache… and the girl from the News would see it as his Dodge City pose: the daguerreotype peace officer, now packing a snub-nosed .38 Smith with rubberbands around the grip instead of a hogleg .44.

How did he explain himself to her? Pictures could jump in his head, as they did right now, clamor for him to tie in the two killings, because he knew beyond any doubt there was a nexus and ballistics and lipstick on cigarette butts would prove it… Or, tests would prove nothing and that’s why there were bored, cynical policemen who seldom ever hoped and were never disappointed… if you wanted to get into poses. Tell her there were all different kinds of policemen just as there were all different kinds of priests and baseball players. Why would she tell him he was posing? Playing a role, she said. You had to know you were doing it before you could be accused of posing. The gunship colonel in that Vietnam movie who wore the old-fashioned cavalry hat-what’s his name, Robert Duvall-strutting across the beach, taking his shirt off to go surfing while the VC were shooting at him-that was posing, for Christ’s sake.

Raymond Cruz said to his sergeants, watching the morgue wagon drive off, “Who wants to go to Palmer Park?… Maureen?”

Alone together in the blue Plymouth neither of them said a word until they were almost to the park. Maureen assumed Raymond was going over the case, sorting out evidence, understandably withdrawn. Which was fine. She never felt obliged to talk, make up things, if there was nothing to say.

Maureen Downey wrote a paper in the ninth grade entitled “Why I Want To Be A Policewoman Someday.” (“Because it really sounds exciting…”) She had to leave Nashville, Michigan, to do it, entered the Detroit Police Academy and was assigned, for nine years, to Sex Crimes. Jerry Hunter would ask her why she supposed she was chosen for it and study her through half-closed eyes. He would ask her about deviates with weird fetishes and Maureen would say, “How about a guy who licks honey off of girls’ feet?” Hunter would say, “What’s wrong with that?… Come on, Maureen, give me a really weird one.” And Maureen would say, “I’m afraid if I give you a raunchy one you’ll try it.”

She was comfortable with all the members of the squad, maybe with Raymond a little more than the others; which didn’t seem to make sense, because most of the time he was pretty quiet, too. But when he did talk he said unexpected things or asked strange questions that didn’t seem to relate to anything.

Like suddenly, after long minutes of silence, asking her if she had seen Apocalypse Now.

Yes. She liked it a lot.

“What’d you like about it?”

“Martin Sheen. And the one on the boat, the skinny one that almost died of fright when the tiger jumped out.”

“You like Robert Duvall?”

“Yeah, I think he’s great.”

“You ever see a movie called The Gunfighter?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Gregory Peck. It’s pretty old-it was on the other night.”

“Not that I remember…”

“There’s a part in it,” Raymond said, “Gregory Peck’s sitting at a table in the saloon, his hands are out of sight, like in his lap, and this hotshot two-gun kid comes in and tries to pick a fight, needles Gregory Peck, you know, to go for his gun, so the kid can make a name for himself.”

“Did Gregory Peck have a big mustache?”

“Yeah, kinda. Pretty big.”

“Yeah, I think I did see it. It was a lot like yours.”

“What?”

“His mustache.”

“Kind of. Anyway, Gregory Peck doesn’t move. He tells the hotshot kid if he wants to draw, go ahead. But, he says, how do you know I don’t have a .44 pointing at your belly while you’re standing there? The kid almost draws, you can see him trying to make up his mind. Does Gregory Peck have a gun under there or not? Finally the kid backs off. He walks out and Gregory Peck sits back in the saloon chair and you see what he had under there was a pocket knife, paring his fingernails.”

“Yeah, I did see it,” Maureen said, “but I don’t remember much about it.”

“That was a good picture,” Raymond said, and was silent again.